When partners ask whether the firm’s current phone system is costing too much, the question almost always points to the invoice. The invoice has the visible number. It’s also, in our experience, the smallest part of the cost.
What follows walks through what ‘outdated’ actually means in today’s legal practice, the costs that show up on the bill, the costs that don’t, what one of those situations looks like inside an Australian firm we’ve worked with, and a practical approach to think about the real cost in your own practice.
What does ‘outdated’ actually mean today?
Outdated isn’t really about the age of the hardware. Plenty of firms run handsets that look new and rely on infrastructure built for a different era. The signal isn’t the phone. It’s what the phone can and can’t do.
In a modern practice, an up-to-date system means calls follow the lawyer rather than the desk, every conversation can be recorded and searched without scrolling through a database, transcripts and AI summaries land in the file note within minutes of the call ending, and remote partners answer with the firm’s number rather than their personal mobile. If the system in front of you doesn’t do those things, it’s outdated regardless of how recently it was installed.
The reason this matters is that the gap between what a modern system enables and what a legacy system blocks is widening every year. A firm that locked in a five-year ISDN contract in 2017 isn’t on the most stable platform. In many cases it’s on a runway that ends sooner than the contract.
What does the invoice actually show you?
The bill captures hardware rental, line charges, call rates, and whatever maintenance plan was bundled in at the start. For most firms we work with, the figure has crept up quietly. A small annual indexation here, an extra add-on there, until it sits somewhere between what the firm thinks it pays and what it actually pays.
This is the cost partners can see, and it’s worth checking. But two things matter more than the number itself.
First, in our experience, very few firms can produce a clean breakdown of what they’re paying for, line by line. The line charges are bundled with old PBX maintenance, which is bundled with mobile, which is bundled with internet. Untangling the bundle is the first step in working out whether the figure on the invoice is justified.
Second, even where the invoice number is reasonable, it’s a lagging indicator. The damage an outdated system does to a firm shows up in places the bill doesn’t reach.
What does the invoice not show you?
This is where the real cost sits. There are four categories firms we’ve worked with consistently underestimate.
Calls that never reached the right person.
A typical week at a busy firm produces a handful of these. A new client calling at 5pm after a referral. A deadline-pressed existing client trying to reach the responsible partner. A barrister returning a call about a brief. None of those missed calls show up in the call log, because the system never saw them. The voicemail isn’t checked until tomorrow. The new client has already called the next firm on Google and won’t call back. The matter that walked out the door doesn’t appear anywhere on a balance sheet. It’s the largest cost on this list.
Billable hours absorbed by admin.
A 30-minute client call generates roughly ten minutes of file-note writing if it’s handled diligently. On a system without transcription or AI summaries, the lawyer either does the writing themselves (billable time spent on admin) or skips it (compliance and dispute risk). Multiply the choice across every fee earner and every call, and the cost shows up as either lost billables or lost record integrity.
Partner overhead.
When the system can’t route after-hours calls properly, the senior partner becomes the system. Calls go to a personal mobile because nothing else picks up. Weekends and evenings absorb client matters that should have been handled by the right person at the right time. The cost is rarely framed as a phone-system problem because partners normalise it. It is one.
Fee disputes that hinge on a record nobody can find.
Recording a call is one thing. Being able to search it is another. A recording you can’t search is, in practical terms, the same as no recording at all. We’ve seen firms with call recording enabled give up on fee disputes because retrieving a specific eight-month-old conversation from their legacy system meant scrolling through thousands of entries with no search function. The firm absorbed the disputed amount to preserve the relationship. That’s a real cost on a real P&L.
None of these costs print on the bill. All of them are larger, in our experience, than the bill itself.
What does this look like inside a real Australian firm?
A family-owned personal injury firm in Brisbane we worked with lived by accurate call records. Compliance demands it, and so does the nature of the work. Before they came across to Untangled, the firm was running an on-premise system that required manual notetaking, manual transcription, and manual collation of call information before anything could be shared internally by email. Each of those manual steps was a place where an action item could be missed or a critical detail could be lost. Client records also had to be updated by hand across multiple platforms, and it wasn’t always clear which version of which record was the most current.
What changed wasn’t the cost of the bill. The firm moved to Dialpad, set up properly. Call recording, live transcription, and AI-generated call summaries became automatic. The mobile app meant team members could log and manage calls from anywhere without losing the record. The administrative burden dropped, the risk of missed action items dropped with it, and the firm’s people spent more of their time on case strategy and client interactions instead of data entry.
The lesson here isn’t about a feature. It’s about the cost of running a legal practice on a system that requires the firm’s people to be the integration layer.
How you’d notice this in your own firm
You don’t need a project to know whether the phone system is costing the firm. Three things tend to surface if a partner stops to look. The senior partner is taking client calls on weekends and personal time. Nobody at the firm can quickly answer who picked up the phone last Friday or what was discussed. The receptionist or office manager mentions missed calls more often than feels normal. If two of those three are showing up, the system has already been costing the firm something for a while.
What changes when the system is actually working?
In the firms we’ve worked with, the visible change is usually quiet. Fewer missed calls. Less time spent on file notes. Less reliance on the senior partner being personally reachable. A search bar that finds a specific conversation in seconds. A bill that reads cleanly because the products and the support model are designed to fit a legal practice rather than a generic SMB.
The deeper change is harder to see and easier to feel. The firm stops working around its phone system and starts working through it. Partners stop describing the comms setup as a thing they tolerate. The conversation shifts from cost to capability.
For firms within twelve months of a contract end, the first useful move is to map the real cost of the system, not just the bill, against what a modern setup would actually do for the practice. If the gap looks meaningful, we’d be glad to walk through what we’ve seen at similar firms. We pick up the phone.
Less tangle. More billable hours.
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